so tl;dr the plan is they identify child porn on phones by creating a hash of every image and looking for that hash in a database which contains hashes of known child porn images.

and what researchers are proving (in that thread) is that you can create a second totally innocent image that has the same hash as the potentially illegal image. which obviously defeats the purpose completely and means that you can essentially get people raided for child porn by just sending them innocent images with the same hashes as child porn.

The real problem with this CSAM scanning is that you will never know if some entity injected other stuff into the databases or maybe there was a FISA court order where apple has to put hashes in there to hunt political opponents, also apple has to adhere to every law in any country where they operate even if there is nothing happening maliciously in the US maybe saudi arabia puts stuff in there to identify dissidents, this scanning is a nightmare of epic proportions because it sets everybody under general suspicion of being a pervert and hands power to investigate from law enforcement to private companies which we all know dont give a fuck about their customers, in short its comparable to the notion to install cameras in everybody´s house because you might hurt your children

in fairness, google has been doing this for over a decade on everyones inboxes and literally with the same platform and no one had much to say about it.

apple fucked up by including the CSAM neural models in an IOS image. you cant protect those client-side without embedding them in a chip (i literally took a blackhat course on this 2 weeks ago) and even then youre just raising the bar for accessing the models, not eliminating it.

so the entire notion of a client side hash detector is fucked and the argument could even be made that apple chose to embrace this (why btw?) on the tail end of the entire concepts functional lifespan, and did so in the least possible secure way.

like dont get me wrong, i appreciate the political abuse concerns. but personally im just completely bowled over by what a fundamentally fubar initiative this is from the ground up. i honestly thought this was just going to be some 'yeah we changed our minds' type PR stunt they rolled out just to put a spotlight on the new iphones.

Full ACK about everything you said especially after the whole pegasus disaster which lets me wondering why apple is so adamant to ram this through even with all the bad implications and dystopian narratives you can conjure from that